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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Do You Like Racing? And Central Cali Summer Heat?

Next weekend (20-21st June, 2015) some of the DT staff are going to be hanging out with Black Iron Racing at the 24 Hrs of LeMons Button Turrible. Black Iron Racing is bringing out their MR Sakibomb, an AW11 MR2 powered by a Kawasaki Ninja engine riding shotgun and we'll be drinking beer in the pits, swinging wrenches, and figuring out how the shift the sketchy sequential box without breaking something.

If anybody out here on the West Coast is interested in saying hi, just drop by the Black Iron Racing pits. To find BIR (previous winners of a 24 Hrs of Lemons & Chumpcar races, People's Choice & People's Curse awards), just listen for the screaming bike engine, obligatory explosions, and habitual cursing. We will have some DT swag to pass out to any readers.

The MR2 has been out to a few track days and races -- lots of teething issues, as you would expect from a home built bike powered car built on a $500 budget. It could be competitive for this race, but BIR will play hare to other team's turtles. The car doesn't have a fuel cell (yet), so the stock MR2 fuel tank is a severe limit on duration of green flag stints. Buttonwillow's extreme heat and strange race schedule might play into MRSakibomb's strengths, but all the armchair racing goes out the window after the green flag drops and the 100+ drivers on the track start bashing into everything.

Yeah, it's funny, when you get called at 530AM with a "hey, we really need X, can you see if you have one?" from some friends-of-friends, you throw X, a bottle of Gojo, a box of blue Harbor Freight gloves, three dirty T-shirts and some coveralls in the trunk of your car at 615, you're at the track at 730 and you spend the next three hours covered in every form of petrochemical known to man trying to get the thing back on the track...that tends to stick in your mind with about the same intensity as the cop's Maglight on you and your girlfriend through the window while parked on the backroad behind the theater parking lot thirty years ago.

That pretty much sums up the usual Lemons experience. Who wouldn't pay someone for the privilege to work on their own car, outside on the ground, in sweltering heat (or torrential rain, or locusts, whatever) while other people are having fun?

Just as I moved from Southern California to the PNW, you silly guys decide to all meet up at buttonwillow (nice reststop and has 4G LTE coverage, I guess the racetrack explains why). (Ever seen the California's Gold program about that town?) RIP Huell Howser.

This car was built by a guy who was inspired by the Geo Metro Gnome - which you may have heard of - which was ostensibly the first bike-engined car in Lemons. It ran a Honda CBR900 engine in FWD configuration followed by a CBR1000 in mid-engine/RWD configuration. Everyone always thought it had a 'busa as well, but it never did. The Metro Gnome was built by general kook / genius / DT commenter Alex Vendler.

We found the MR2 through the wife of the builder, who worked at Kawasaki. The car came with the bike engine installed, on a modified jet ski trailer, with a winch and spare parts...for $1000! The trailer alone is worth over half that so this is a genuine Lemons-legal motocar.

We let the previous owner spend all (ok, most) of the money and benefitted from his hard work. In true DT fashion. The car needed a lot of detailed sorting. Cooling, charging, braking, engine management, cage welding, and suspension all needed major attention. But it did run and drive. RACE READY.

Would you (or any other DTers) be interested in a Project Car series on the MR Sakibomb?

I could certainly get that going, as half-owner of the car. I also call myself a crew chief, fabricator, engineer, and driver, in that order.

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